Hi I'm Andrew Michael Hurley and this is my new novel Starve Acre. It's set in the
Yorkshire Dales and it concerns a couple called Richard and Juliet Willoughby
who've moved there to try and start a new family, have a new life away from the
city. However their son Ewan dies when he's very, very young and so we meet them
in the novel about six months after this as they're trying to come to terms with
with the tragedy. The house becomes very, very claustrophobic. Juliet and Richard
are pulling in very different directions. Juliet still believes that Ewan is
there in some form in the house. Richard is trying to get her to move on and even
think about having another child. In her desperation Juliet calls on the the help
of a group of occultists called the Beacons who she hopes are going to be
able to bring Ewan's spirit back to the house. Richard is very cynical about this
and so is Juliet's sister Harriet who comes to try and persuade her to go and see
a psychiatrist instead. And so to escape all this pressure and
claustrophobia in the house, Richard goes to the field where he's trying to
discover the remains of an old oak tree that once grew there. And as he digs for
those roots he comes across the skeleton of a hare, this beautifully preserved,
pristine skeleton of a hare. And so in order to preserve it he takes it back to
the house and over the months and the weeks as a spring emerges
this hare becomes a symbol of hope for him. So he has this newfound sense of
hope but it's a hope that's really severely tested the more he learns about
the circumstances of Ewan's death, there's a lot that he doesn't know.
I'm here in Waterstones in Piccadilly and I'd like to share with you three books
that have really been inspirational to me as a writer. The first one is Stephen
King's The Shining. I grew up reading Stephen King when I was a teenager.
I wrote lots of short stories and attempted some novels in the same sort
of style as Stephen King and he became a big influence on me. And I think he's
certainly one of the writers that made me want to become a writer so I owe a
lot to him. I like The Shining very much for many, many reasons, not least its storytelling.
I love the echoes of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque
of the Red Death in there. The conceit of the story about being trapped
in a hotel in the winter is just so simple but it's so, so chilling. But I
also really like it because of what it meant to him as well as a writer. He
calls this his 'crossroads' novel, where he said that he tried something different,
he tried to have a little bit more ambition in his writing and that's certainly
reflected in the novel. It's not just a horror story. It's something much more
than that. It's an amazing study of madness, of guilt, of the
guilt of parents in particular. Well, we're gonna stay in the horror section
for my next choice which is M. R. James Ghost Stories. These are stories that
have really had a huge influence on my writing and me as a writer. I think
mostly because the way in which he writes about landscape and landscape is
one of the things that I'm really interested in writing about myself.
Probably not unusually for an antiquarian lots of his characters do
lots of unearthing and archaeology and I think in doing that they unearth a lot
of history and folklore, mythology and stories that are there just underneath
the landscape of the England that M R James writes about. And that really
appealed to me. I really like that idea of looking at the layers
that are beneath. He's an amazing writer for many reasons not least because of the
way in which he writes about malevolence and evil. I think he gives it a real
potency because in many of his best stories we never really find out the
motivations for the supernatural entities that are pursuing the
protagonists. If I had to pick a favourite from from this collection I think it
would be A Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad which was a huge influence on my
first novel The Loney, particularly the moment of paralysis that occurs at the
end of that story, where the professor is faced with
something that he cannot possibly explain, he can't reason his way out of
it and all his education and learning is of no protection against the thing
that's confronting him. And it's a moment of intellectual and physical paralysis
that I introduced into my novel as well. Well, my last choice is
Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales. I've been a big fan of Shirley Jackson for a long time,
ever since reading her short story The Lottery. It's probably her most famous
story. The story itself is fantastic, it builds to this amazing crescendo of menace
at the end. But it's also the reaction to that story that I've always found really
interesting. When it was published in The New Yorker many people cancelled their
subscription because they were so outraged by what they'd read. Equally
there are a number of people who wrote to The New Yorker asking where they could
go and see this particular ritual, thinking that it was real. And I think
that that really captures what her fiction is about, you know this interest
that we have in the supernatural or this interest that we have in the
macabre. That we are appalled by it but we're also completely fascinated by it as
well. So I think what I really like about her as a writer is the way that she sets
her stories in the seemingly real world, these are places that we recognise, these
are ordinary people in ordinary situations; but what she's very good at I
think is stretching the edges of that reality until it becomes porous and it
allows the uncanny and the strange and the supernatural in. And then they become
these slightly otherworldly places, rather sort of dreamlike, liminal spaces,
and that's something I've tried to do my my own writing as well. If I had to
choose a story from here I think it probably would be the last story in the
collection which is called The Summer People. I think it's just a brilliant
example of the way that she writes, the way that she writes about menace in
particular. There were just these little twists and turns, little tweaks of
reality in that story that just make the menace kind of into this sort
of creeping force that builds and builds and builds towards the end.